Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Great Steam Numbers

I just want to jump in to say that I don't think it takes the DnD brand to create a cRPG that goes viral. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the brand helps pump the well, but I believe the love of DnD and the genre in general prove that an audience exists. They might gravitate toward DnD, but that's because it's trusted and has had years to learn what kind of things players are looking for.

Still though, there's room for improvement. Another system could come along and satisfy the needs of players. It would take vision and talent and skill and hard work. Great art is important, of course, as is the world-building and story. After that, the mechanics need to be interesting to the masses. I don't claim that any of this is easy, but I reject the notion that it's not possible or not going to happen. I believe it will happen.

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Regarding DnD, I think there's plenty of room for improvement. Take the Warlock class for instance. You make a pact, right? What do you get? All of the warlocks look pretty similar, relying on Eldritch Blast. I think it's going in the right direction with things like the Pact of the Blade versus the Pact of the Tome, but it hasn't gone far enough.

If you're going to sell your soul, what do you want? I suggest that what one person wants isn't necessarily the same as another. Someone might want to be the best swordsman. Another might want magic secrets or an increased lifespan. Maybe someone wants to an enormous hulking brute, and someone else wants riches while another person bargains for beauty. Having a list of these types of options would be so much better, and there could be major and minor pacts that spell out how deep your loyalty goes to the entity in question, which would reflect the relative strength of your reward.

I respectfully disagree. D&D holds a mystique for many that no other IP can fill. I have played so many CRPGs, even DoS2 and just could not stop thinking "man I wish this was D&D."

For the others, 5e rules are the distillation of several decades of playtesting to find that balance. Kinda like democracy, it is the worst system ever except for all the others.

Now one thing I think that new players or only CRPG players tend to miss is that Wizards and Warlocks and the other classes are normally positioned as rare in the world.

BG3 does this differently because it has to to make a compelling game and does it perfectly. Keep in mind however that as far as D&D campaigns go BG3 is super-fast-paced, VERY dense with encounters. You would not see so much magic in a tabletop D&D game except from your own party and maybe at the end.

Regarding your last couple of paragraphs, this is where the DM and the players around a table top use the D&D rules to tell a collaborative story. The computer game cannot possbily account for the level of granularity you describe, as that is expressed via role play normally. What you are asking for is a custom class where you pick the bonuses. D&D and BG3 can already be min/maxed to absurdity.

Larian did a damn fine job in implementing 5e, but after level 12, or level 9 spells, casters become world breakers.

I would liken it to something like filmmaking. It's certainly easier for a studio to do a sequel or a remake of an existing intellectual property, and we see that time and time again. But the property in question was once original. That alone stands as proof that original properties can succeed in the marketplace. The problem, of course, is that it's easier for corporations to focus on the tried and true. Cautious business is often smart business.

I suspect a brave and innovative force will come out with something. In my opinion, it's inevitable. Again, it's not easy. All of the ingredients have to line up properly, along with a marketing campaign that gets through to the modern audience, which is to say more raw, more guerilla and less sanitary.

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My point about Warlocks was one about flavor. It's an element of flavor that DnD lacks. The classes are too homogenized, so to speak, and by that I mean there's room for improvement. For a different example, take the Valour Bard. Compare it to the Swords Bard if you're playing a human or half-elf. It's lackluster.

I bring these small examples up to showcase that the system is imperfect, and thus subject to competition.

Personally, I enjoy the DnD mechanic of BG3, but I can imagine numerous changes I'd like to see.

This is probably why Cyberpunk 2077 has the more immersive, deeper and accessible world as it is a known property that has been around for 32 years and is based on a significant and trackable literary tradition.

Same with D&D

Sadly the only other property that has this kind of developed IP that interests me is owned by Paradox Games - World of Darkness - and they look like they are headed for a complete flop with the changes to Bloodlines 2 coming out next year, but I guess we will see.

There is certainly some good art in indies. But there are also some good indies (IMHO of course) that have bad art.

Knights of the Chalice 2 (very, very niche, but very good if its YOUR niche, also pretty bad art)
Anything by Spiderweb Software (ie. Geneforge, Avernum, Avadon). All of it is good, and all of it has bad art. Owner Jeff Vogel has blogged about why here: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-all-of-our-games-look-like-crap.html

Age of Decadence and Battle Brothers are both fun games with graphics that are not great, but work anyway.

Solasta's art isn't all terrible, but the character models are. Still fun.

I could list more, but I don't really want to spam the board with 80% of my steam library.

This is something most younger gamers do not understand. Back in the EARY days of computer gaming three primary genre drove game development. Simulations, Streatgey Gaming and RPGs. In the RPG Genre DnD was not just a driving force, it was THE driving force. The impact of using the DnD IP cannot be overstated as it drove in newer players due to the recent DnD boom and pulled back old school gamers remembering fondly those days when computers let us step away from dice and charts.

If you pulled DnD from this game, took the story out of the realms and tweaked it around another game world. It would be considered a good game, no doubt but the sales numbers would have been around a 3rd of what they have been if they where lucky. This is not to dimmish the work Larian has done, this is just to say the DnD inclusion is a key component to the success.

This doesn't really jive with my memories of the 80's and 90's. The gold box games were solid, as was Eye of the Beholder, but I wouldn't say that those games drove the industry. If you had asked me in the early 90's what the most important RPG was I would have without any reservation at all said Ultima. Now there is room for argument there (and my opinion has changed A LOT in the past 30 years) but it was definitely a highly influential series, and also definitely not D&D.

I do think its fair to say that the AD&D was well represented at the time. But it shared shelf space with: the Ultima games, Wizardry , Might and Magic, Betrayal at Krondor, and that's just what comes to mind off of the top of my head. I think you could argue that D&D was part of the influence behind each of those games too, but certainly not all of it. They were each pretty much their own thing (except Betrayal at Krondor, which was based on a book series). Dungeons and Dragons are absolutely an important part of the history of cRPG's, but they are not all of it, or even a majority of it.

Okay my point might have been poorly worded, Ultima and Wizardry where driving force computer games, along with Bards Tale. However all of them, their devs said this, owed their design and existence to DnD. The actual DnD games came a bit later in the initial game development however those early RPGs that created the genre all revered DnD.

"We can never break the sound barrier."

"We can never walk on the moon."

"We can never have another cRPG IP that goes viral without the DnD brand."

Well that was before my time. It was BG1 that introduced me into roleplaying games. The only one of these old games I've ever played was Wizardry 8 and while it was interesting in some regards I cant say it was really great[1].

The best rulesystems for computer roleplaying games are in MMORPGs though. If it was still possible, I would still play Vanguard: Saga of Heroes exactly for this reason, the awesome class implementations (there have been many other reasons of course). Unfortunately of course that game is gone.

D&D on the other hand is odd in many ways because its optimized to be played with pen and paper, not for computers. Still compared to many rulesystems made for computers specifically, like The Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age, it rules supreme.

Even the simplified version of D&D, d20, still works quite nicely.



[1]: To be more specific, the fact that you had to have a fight every five meters made me tired of the game pretty quickly.

Well, but that's the thing. For me, I DON'T want it to be a D&D game necessarily. I actually do not like D&D mechanics, and want someone out there to come up with something better. But because so many millions of gamers, and especially and specifically cRPG-ers, are so very wedded to D&D mechanics and often won;t even give something else a chance, any cRPG that is not D&D automatically takes a huge popularity hit. And that sucks for me, because I specifically want party-based fantasy-setting cRPGs that are NOT D&D.

Plus, I absolutely hate WotC and I want RPG developers to effectively tell WotC exactly where they can shove it.

SPECIAL >>>> D&D.

Best CRPG system ever. If it's used meaningful ways that is (looking at every Nu-Fallout in existence, except New Vegas of course).

Personal Bias: I don't like Vancian spellcasting. I love "the Dying Earth" so I can understand why Gygax included it in his game, but it is (IMHO) not a fun mechanic for a game. I'm much happier with some sort of mana or stamina based spellcasting in my cRPG's, and as such, I do not personally find D&D to be all that necessary an addition to the genre (although there have obviously been some fantastic games that used it).

I agree with you the current DnD system to me is "mostly" not that great, I have always preferred the older 2dn and 3rd edition rules and even then they are limited. The best RPG system in my opinion as the Dangerous Journey's system. It moved away from the class system to skill based and created a open play system, that could be EASILY adapted to the world of CRPGs.

The mystique of DnD is still what draws people in. It was the "father" of the modern RPG and deserves respect but I feel like it has been messed with to much and has lost some of what made it great. The good news is the DEEP game worlds like the Forgotten Realms , may possibly be accessed. I have in the past done a small Forgotten Realms campaign in Dangerous Journeys. (The magic system is just so cool) and know quite a few DMs that currently use Pathfinder to run campaigns in the Realms.

Yeah and that is my dilemma: I don't care for (current) D&D mechanics at all, but I absolutely LOVE the Forgotten Realms setting. So, ideally, what I'd want is for a cRPG to use the FR setting but NOT the D&D rules and mechanics. But of course WotC does not allow for this, which is yet another reason for me to hate on WotC.

FYI, Obsidian is moving to a classless, skills-based system for Avowed.